From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!mips!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!tdatirv!sarima Thu Dec 26 23:57:53 EST 1991
Article 2343 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Occam's barber had many customers
Message-ID: <351@tdatirv.UUCP>
Date: 20 Dec 91 22:56:56 GMT
References: <60551@netnews.upenn.edu> <334@tdatirv.UUCP> <60758@netnews.upenn.edu>
Reply-To: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: Teradata Corp., Irvine
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In article <60758@netnews.upenn.edu> weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener) writes:
|In other words, NNs are too powerful to let us decide.

But then, that is why I suspect they are sufficient for 'mind'.
|
|Let me give Penrose's argument in a nutshell, ignoring all the cutesypie
|bogosities that made his book so hopelessly annoying: QM is known to be
|incomplete--... , so it will give us a clear cut account of
|what observation is.  And without this theory, we won't ever really under
|observation.
|
|>O.K. But *why* do we *need* to link into the quantum world?
|>I do not see it as at all necessary or relevant, as far as cognition
|>or consciousness is concerned.
|
|Physicists connected consciousness with quantum mechanics over sixty
|decades ago.  The debate has never ended.  Your 4 *assumes* one side
|of this debate.  Penrose *assumes* the other side.

Oh hoh!  So that is where he is comong from, the idea of 'observation'
in QM "collapsing" the wave function!

In that case a recent experimental result from physics is relevant, and
tends to support my view that QM is irrelevant to mind.

The basic result of the experiment was that a simple mechanical device,
with no human observer (and indeed no record kept of the interaction)
was sufficient in and of itself to act as an 'observer' (in terms of
collapsing the wave function and eliminated interference patterns).
This seems to clearly indicate that 'mind' is irrelevant to QM 'observation'.

[Note, I have long considered QM 'observation' to be a purely physical
phenomenon, with no connection to mind - just to complexity].

|  You
|*have* made an additional assumption--namely that QM follows certain
|interpretations--but because this assumption lies outside the direct
|focus of the questions you want to investigate, you can't see or care
|one way or the other what extra philosophical baggage you have.

Actually, until this moment I had not realized that the reason he was so
insistant on a QM connection with mind was the Copenhagen interpretation
of QM.  That explains alot.  It is true that in this area he and I have
different assumption.  However as I remember it I did not develop my QM
interpretations from a biological perspective, but rather a mechanistic
bias against the Copenhagen approach. [True, until the recent experiment
it was mainly just a bias].

|>You must show some observable cognitive processes that are *inconsistant*
|>with a non-quantum explanation before such a link becomes necessary.
|
|You are overstating the case.  A quantum explanation may simply be simpler
|and/or superior.  QM is certainly more general.

In some sense.  In fact in some sense the brain is a QM system, since that
is the basis of all of chemistry.  But most of the relevant phenomena are
emergent at a level several stages above QM.

|Consider ambiguous word resolution.  There is evidence that all the
|meanings are activated in parallel, and yet we only observe one at a
|time.  I presume something similar happens with ambiguous figures.
|
|The simplest interpretation is, quite simply, that there is a quantum
|observable corresponding to "meaning", and by means of wave function
|collapse, one eigenvalue--an unambiguous meaning--is observed.

Or a NN operating as a noise filter eliminates those meanings not
consistant with current context.  What we call consciousness appears to
be only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, in the arena of brain functions.

|A neural net model would have to couple with evolutionary dictates
|that say fortune favors the unambiguous.  Entirely plausible, but
|definitely more complicated.

Not really hard, evolution favors quick decisions.  Vacilating can lead
to death.  If competing alternatives are filtered out early, decisions can
be made faster.

|I posted a separate article "Linear -> Non-linear theory bifurcation",
|explaining how this depends crucially on a linearity in the bulb.  The
|experimental agreement does not let you distiguish between internal and
|external models of cognition.

This seems to be an area of neurobiology I have not managed to keep up
on.  Could you e-mail me some references on the nature of this non-linearity
and the observational basis for concluding its presence.

At present, without more background in this area, I cannot easily evaluate
your claims.
-- 
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uunet!tdatirv!sarima				(Stanley Friesen)


